The present invention relates to a method and a device for cataloging and searching for information in a generic data archive, with particular reference s to archives containing photographic data, catalogs, videos and images in general.
The data banks of companies operating in the visual sector, including in particular the data banks of photo agencies, are currently constituted by such a vast amount of information as to be almost entirely unmanageable with conventional means. For the success of such a company, therefore, it is crucially important not only to offer quality images but also to be able to give assurance to its customers and users in general that they can have rapid and targeted access to its archives. It is in fact known that with the explosive growth of data banks in terms of numbers and size, in recent years a problem has become evident and critical, i.e., the severe difficulty in effectively interpreting the requests of the customer and in directing him toward the information in which he is really interested.
Recently it has been possible to improve and speed up the management and searching of information archives, allowing rapid querying of electronic data banks by means of appropriate interfacing devices. In particular, by way of the diffusion and increase in performance and capacity of electronic computers it has been possible to provide users or customers with electronic archives on magnetic or optical recording media, such as CD-ROMs, and allow the querying of remote archives which can be accessed via computer networks such as for example the Internet. Although archive and cataloging media have improved, searches are still conducted by entering in masks a specific series of data, such as the field considered, the illustrated subject and the author; such data are unable to effectively express the mental idea of the user. The current state of the art is constituted by interfaces which allow, once a certain information item, for example an image, has been identified, to conduct a new targeted search toward other similar images. The results of such searches, however, are often scarcely predictable, since they generate even considerable conceptual differences with respect to the initial idea, indeed due to the lack of a cataloging method which is sufficiently close to the mentality of the user and is capable of corresponding to his emotional language. Conventional methods and devices for archiving and cataloging in fact do not allow to qualify an image according to characteristics which can be easily associated with the user's mental idea; the user is therefore forced to conduct a long and tiring work of visualizing information outside of his actual scope of interest before being able to obtain any information which at long last meets his requirements.